Quote:
Originally Posted by Resurrection
So, we should keep using daylight time aware of all the health and psychological issues cuz it will interfere a little with hockey times?
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If you think about it, interfering with hockey times multiple times during the winter should actually cause worse health issues than a once-a-year change to the clocks.
This study suggests that there's a slight increase (8%) in the rate of patients suffering a stroke in the two days immediately following the time shift, compared to two weeks before and after the shift:
https://www.aan.com/PressRoom/Home/PressRelease/1440
There is no increase after the first two days.
This slight increase is believed to be caused by the disruption of the person's circadian rhythms and the lost hour of sleep people experience in the two days following the time shift until their bodies adjust.
Now, think about later hockey games. A game that starts at 8:00pm will typically be over shortly after 10:30pm (unless it goes to OT). A game that starts at 9:00pm will be over shortly after 11:30pm. A game that starts at 9:30pm (most Kings and Sharks weeknight home games start at 7:30pm PT), won't be over until sometime after midnight.
Now, instead of having to adjust your sleep cycle twice a year for a couple of days (which can be prepared for ahead of time to help reduce the negative impact), you could lose an hour of sleep every time you want to watch a game played in California or Vancouver (or Vegas, starting next year) for most of the hockey season.
It doesn't just have to be hockey games either. It can be any tv show.
Let's say you have a person who doesn't own a PVR and doesn't subscribe to any time-shifting channels, so they watch their favourite shows whenever they happen to air in Spokane. This person's favourite show airs Wednesday nights at 10:00pm in Spokane. Right now, that person watches the show at 11:00pm in Calgary. After it's over at midnight, they go to bed and get 6 hours of sleep and go to work the next day.
If we stop changing our clocks, from November to March, this person's favourite show will air starting at midnight and won't end until 1:00am. Now, the person only gets 5 hours of sleep because they still have to go to work at the same time.
This wouldn't be happening once a year for a couple of days in early March, it would be happening every Wednesday night for four months of the year.
Sports and TV schedules are pretty superficial, but that doesn't change the fact that a lot of people plan their lives around those schedules.
Even beyond things like entertainment, many businesses in Alberta operate on schedules that are dictated by people in other time zones. If the argument in favour of not going onto DST is that it will make it so that people don't have to adjust to the time change, it simply won't be true for a large number of Albertans who would still have to alter their schedules to align with the schedules of people they do business with in other time zones. So instead of shifting their clocks by an hour twice a year, they'd have to shift their entire schedules. It would have the same end result, but be a lot more confusing.